Trade, Apprenticeship or Retake? What the AI Data Actually Says

The government has published a ranked list of which jobs are most exposed to artificial intelligence. Number one is management consultants and business analysts. Number three is chartered and certified accountants.

The list of jobs least exposed starts with sports players, then roofers, then elementary construction, then plasterers.

If you have missed your grades and you are weighing up whether to retake or go and learn a trade, that is worth sitting with for a moment. The usual framing, that a degree is the safe route and a trade is the risky one, is not what the data says.

It is also not the whole story, and the part that gets left out is the part that matters most for your decision.

What the Government Actually Found

The figures come from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s report The impact of AI on UK jobs and training (opens in a new tab), which scored and ranked every occupation in the UK by its exposure to AI.

Its finding on skill level is blunt. Professional occupations, the ones at the highest skill level, are more exposed to AI than other occupations. Occupations requiring the lowest levels of education are less exposed.

Here are the top of each list, as published:

Further down the most-exposed list: solicitors, legal professionals, HR occupations, bookkeepers, marketing associate professionals, and civil engineers. Further down the least-exposed list: bricklayers, floorers and wall tilers, painters and decorators, gardeners, and tyre and exhaust fitters.

These are not predictions about job losses. Exposure means how much of the work AI can plausibly do, not how many people will lose their jobs. But as a map of where the pressure is, it points the opposite way to the careers advice most students have heard.

The Sentence Everyone Skips

The report explains why those manual jobs score low, and the explanation is the important bit.

It describes the least exposed occupations as involving “more manual work that is technically difficult, in unpredictable environments, and with lower wages (reducing the incentive to automate)”.

Read the clause in brackets again. One reason a job is safe from automation is that it does not pay enough to be worth automating.

So “AI-proof” and “well paid” are not the same thing, and a route chosen purely because a machine cannot do it is a route chosen on one variable out of two. The genuinely strong position is work that is hard to automate and commands a good wage, which in the trades means the skilled, qualified, self-employed end of it rather than the entry level.

That is a real argument for a trade. It is not an argument for skipping qualifications.

The Apprenticeship Nobody Tells You About

Here is where the decision gets concrete, and where a lot of advice goes wrong.

“Apprenticeship” covers two completely different things. There are Level 2 and Level 3 apprenticeships, which are broadly GCSE and A-level equivalent, and there are higher and degree apprenticeships at Levels 4 to 7, where you work and come out with a degree and no debt.

The second kind is the one students actually want when they say apprenticeship. It is also competitive.

Department for Education apprenticeship statistics (opens in a new tab) for August 2025 to April 2026 show 308,770 apprenticeship starts in total. Of those:

Level 6 starts account for about 8% of all apprenticeship starts. Twenty five thousand places, nationally, across every employer and every sector, and demand for them is rising.

Employers running those schemes set their own entry requirements, and for the sought-after ones in engineering, finance, law and technology, those requirements are A-level grades. Often the same grades a university would ask for, sometimes higher, because the employer is also hiring you as staff.

Which produces the thing students are not told: a degree apprenticeship is not an alternative to needing good A-levels. It is another thing that needs good A-levels.

If your grades are the reason you are reading this, that route is narrowed for you in exactly the same way the university route is.

So What Should You Actually Do?

Three honest situations, and they lead to different answers.

You want a specific trade, and the employers in it do not ask for A-levels

Then go. Now, not in a year.

Plenty of skilled trades recruit at Level 2 or Level 3 with GCSEs, and a year spent retaking A-levels you do not need is a year of earning and training lost. Check what the actual employers and training providers in your trade ask for, not what a careers website says in general.

The AI exposure data supports this choice, with the wage caveat above attached. Aim at the skilled, qualified end, not the entry level, and plan for the qualifications that get you there.

You want a degree apprenticeship or a competitive degree

Then the grades are the gate, and retaking is how you get through it. There is no route around a requirement by choosing a different institution that has the same requirement.

Our page on whether A-level retakes improve grades has the evidence on what a retake year typically achieves, and A-level retake costs covers what it involves financially.

You genuinely do not know yet

This is most people at eighteen, and it is the only situation where retaking is the right answer for a reason other than a specific grade requirement.

A year of retakes with better grades at the end leaves every route open: university, degree apprenticeship, higher apprenticeship, or a trade. A year spent in an entry-level job closes some of them, not permanently but at real cost.

That is not an argument that retaking is better. It is an argument that it is reversible, and that the alternatives are less so. If you are undecided, buy the optionality.

If a year out appeals more than a year of study, gap year versus retakes weighs that up, and foundation year versus retakes covers the third route people forget.

What the Data Does Not Tell You

Two limits worth stating plainly.

The DSIT ranking is about exposure, not outcomes. A job being exposed to AI can mean the job gets easier and the person doing it gets more productive, not that the job disappears. Accountancy has been “about to be automated” for forty years and there are more accountants than ever.

And none of this is a forecast about the specific job you will be doing in 2045. Anybody who tells you with confidence which careers will exist then is guessing. The defensible version of the argument is narrower: right now, the measurable pressure from AI sits more heavily on office-based professional work than on skilled manual work, and that is the reverse of what most people assume.

The Short Version

Government data puts consultants, accountants, financial managers and solicitors among the occupations most exposed to AI, and roofers, plasterers, steel erectors and bricklayers among the least. If that is your reason for questioning the academic route, the evidence is genuinely on your side.

But the report also says part of why those jobs are safe is that they pay too little to be worth automating, and the apprenticeships that pay well want A-level grades just as universities do. Only about 25,000 Level 6 apprenticeship starts exist nationally, and employers pick from the top of the applicant pool.

So the question is not “A-levels or a trade”. It is what the specific route you want actually asks for. If it asks for grades, retaking is the route. If it does not, do not spend a year getting them.

If you want to talk through which of those you are in, get in touch and we will go through it with you.